Re: [REVIEW][PATCH 2/3] exec: Don't allow ptracing an exec of an unreadable file

From: Willy Tarreau
Date: Thu Nov 17 2016 - 16:33:26 EST


On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 01:07:33PM -0800, Kees Cook wrote:
> I'm not opposed to a sysctl for this. Regardless, I think we need to
> embrace this idea now, though, since we'll soon end up with
> architectures that enforce executable-only memory, in which case
> ptrace will again fail. Almost better to get started here and then not
> have more surprises later.

Also that makes me realize that by far the largest use case of ptrace
is strace and that strace needs very little capabilities. I guess that
most users would be fine with having only pointers and not contents
for addresses or read/write of data, as they have on some other OSes,
when the process is not readable. But in my opinion when a process
is executable we should be able to trace its execution (even without
memory read access).

Willy